In one of the last scenes of director Vikram Gandhi’s “Barry,” the title character (played by Devon Terrell) sits in a sand trap at the ritzy country club where his girlfriend’s family is hosting a wedding. Barry’s still in shock from the news he’s just gotten about his absentee father, who has died unexpectedly in Kenya. So he sits and smokes, and pulls out his wallet to read an unsent letter that he wrote to his dad. The letter describes the tough time he’s been having adjusting to life New York and Columbia University. At the end, it’s signed, “Love, Barack.”
There are two ways to interpret the coyness with which Gandhi and screenwriter Adam Mansbach avoid using the words “Barack” and “Obama” throughout this film. One is that they genuinely want to keep the central subject of their film under wraps until the end. But that seems implausible, given that the premise is the main selling-point. People are going to want to see “Barry” because it dramatizes the turbulent early 20s of a man who would go on to become president. And the movie takes full advantage of the audience’s curiosity: whether it’s savoring the irony of the hero telling his girlfriend Charlotte (Anya-Taylor Joy) that he hates politics; or it’s showing the young Obama going out of his way to listen to other people’s problems and to charm them.
In fact, the biggest problem with “Barry” is that at times it’s too much of a Great Man Narrative — even moreso than this year’s Barack-and-Michelle’s-first-date movie “Southside with You” (read our review). In the latter film, Obama is already on the career path that will lead to The White House, so the character is a lot like who he is now in real life, having already gone through a process of self-discovery. “Barry” is more contrived in the way it frames the POTUS-to-be, showing him learning about coalition-building and testing out his negotiation skills — like Spider-Man spinning his first few tentative webs.
And yet “Barry” is still unexpectedly moving — and becomes increasingly so as it heads into its home stretch. That may be because of the real reason why the name “Barack Obama” is mostly absent from this film. It’s not that Gandhi and Mansbach want us to forget who this man is, but more that they want to remind us that Obama was also once a confused interracial kid completely overwhelmed by the big city. A childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia didn’t prepare him for how much the color of his skin would govern his interactions with whites and blacks alike in New York. There’s something widely relatable about the way Barry tries to find somewhere to fit in, and preferably in a place where he can be himself and not somebody else’s symbol.
As was the case with ‘Southside,’ it misses the point to say that “Barry” would be way too slight if we didn’t already know who the main character would grow up to be. If anything, the specific details of Obama’s biography provide a lot of good material for Mansbach and Gandhi to dramatize. In one of the movie’s best scenes, Charlotte takes the famous picture of Obama in Central Park wearing a goofy hat. His anger at her photo making him look cute and tame speaks volumes about how the young Barack struggled to forge an identity beyond just what white people wanted him to be.
Sometimes “Barry” relies on on-the-nose scenes, depicting the character’s self-consciousness in both Harlem (where he thinks everyone’s staring disdainfully at the white woman on his arm) and at Charlotte’s parents’ upscale digs (where Barry tries extra-hard to reassure them that he comes from an academic family, while they scramble to let him know that they were ‘60s activists), But as blunt as those moments are, they don’t exactly ring false. When a mixed-race power-couple at the movie’s climactic wedding tells Barack that his muddled background just makes him “an American,” it’s a corny line. It’s also insightful. [B]
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